Very frustrated

hi I recently started with a new coach. I have been lifting weights five days a week for years doing cardio three days a week as well. I had an issue losing weight and I decided to go into a build phase for about four months. I was eating 2250 cal and weight training five days a week with no cardio. After four months I decided to add some in on my own before starting my real deficit. I added cardio in for five days a week 30 minutes. I started with this guy and he brought my calories down to 1700 and I’m doing cardio five days a week 45-50 minutes each session. I’ve been working with him for 15 weeks and I’ve only lost 5 pounds. my inches have barely gone down but my pictures that I take biweekly with him have slight improvements. I’m very upset with this. My goal was to lose a pound a week. I know there is going to be weeks where I don’t lose, but the goal was still a pound a week. I’m very frustrated and feel so unmotivated. I want to continue and lose a pound a week. Am I wrong for questioning why he hasn’t brought my calorie down? I’m a female and weigh 153 pounds and I’m 5 foot 4 age 38. I’m really upset because I wanted to feel and look good for the summer.
what am I doing wrong. I do want to add that I do feel the cardio a bit much for me and sometimes my weight training is exhausting. I do want to add that he is a bodybuilding coaches a lot of competitors so it’s not like he doesn’t know how to get Someone stage ready. That’s not the look or the lifestyle I’m looking for, but I do feel a pound a week is a healthy normal goal.
Any feedback would be wonderful
Replies
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I find the macros matter more than the calories. I aim to eat about a 3:4 ratio of protein grams to carb grams per meal or snack, and I think I am at 80g protein per day. I eat lots of cottage cheese and chicken breast, low glycemic veggies and fruit, a little bread and pasta, about half the usual serving size. I got back on the wagon two weeks ago and lost 5 lbs first week. I am eating 1500 cals/day and I am a lot larger than you are plus 5'9".
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PS sorry protein is 150g/day… my macros are 40% protein, 30% carbs (low glycemic) and 30% fat (olive, butter, low fat mayo, avocado, salmon…).
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What the coach has you doing seems sustainable and I think is a good plan from what you've stated. You chose to add in cardio on your own, and are now claiming to be exhausted... so... slow down on the cardio a bit if it's too much. Strength training is important, slow (Not fast) weight loss is important. Both matter for muscle retention and bone health. You don't want to look like a skeleton with a beach ball stomach when you're done, ideally, no?
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He would have added five days of cardio as well. I just beat him to it. I just think five pounds in 15 weeks is extremely slow process…
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It's a healthy, sustainable rate of loss.
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Exercising to the point of exhaustion is counterproductive. Put simplistically, fatigue makes us drag through the day, burning fewer calories in daily life, effectively wiping out some of the exercise calories. On top of that, it implies too large a total exercise load for best fitness progress.
A rule of thumb many serious exercisers and recreational athletes use is to increase total exercise load by no more than about 10% per week. It sounds like you've increased more than that all at once. Professionals may have better metrics available to them from sports lab tests or professional advisors, but we regular duffers will need to rely on more subjective factors . . . such as fatigue and mood.
Total exercise load is a combination of all we do - sometimes even including non-exercise factors like a job change. It encompasses duration, intensity, frequency, type of exercise, and possibly even some contextual non-exercise factors like nutrition, hydration, sleep and stress can affect the outcome. Our exercise history matters, in terms of what we're conditioned to do. (What would be an easy day for an elite athlete in my sport would be punitively, unproductively overdoing for me.)
I'm not saying this next is true for you, because I have no way of knowing . . . but it's a theoretically possible thing. Calorie deficit and exercise are stressors. With good tactics, they're useful stress that will produce positive outcomes, but they still increase our total physical/psychological stress load, in combination with any other stressors in our lives. With too much cumulative stress from all sources, we can have systemically increased cortisol, and that can lead to creepingly increased water retention (and worse). The water retention can mask ongoing gradual fat loss on the scale for multiple weeks.
Repeat: I don't know if that is affecting you. I'm sure I'm biased by my own experiences. I'm about your height (5'5") but lighter (lower 130s pounds), quite active athletically and have been for years. I'm also much older, which theoretically would make me metabolically slower but also less resilient to excessive exercise. All that said, I'm certain that for me - possibly not you - eating 1700 gross calories, plus lifting 5 days a week, plus doing anything more intense than trivial cardio for 45-50 minutes 5 days a week . . . that would be seriously punitive for me, counterproductive. These days, I wouldn't even try to lose as fast as a pound a week at a healthy or near-healthy weight alongside a heavy exercise schedule. For me, it would be a bad plan. But one person's experience - mine or a PP's - doesn't really shed any light on what's true for you.
You have at least one subjective outcome - feeling exhausted and unmotivated - that suggests you're overdoing. I'm no expert, but my advice would be to back down that total load somewhat, and see if that helps you feel better. You might even want to go to estimated maintenance calories alongside that for a couple of weeks, maybe refeeding carbs to get the extra calories. The worst that could happen, I think, would be finding or feeling that you've wasted those couple of weeks. I'm not sure that'd be a huge risk in current circumstances. At 38, I doubt that you'd detrain enough in a couple of weeks to make a bad dent in long-term progress. But I'm no expert.
Best wishes!
ETA P.S. How's your nutrition, especially macros, grams-wise? Personally I'd find it challenging to get ideal nutritional support for that much exercise on 1700 gross calories, but I know I have an atypical eating style.
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Too much exercise can be counter productive for 2 reasons, you end up being less active outside the gym (lower NEAT) and your appetite increases, usually with snacks that you don't count in your daily amounts.
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